The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan written in 1962. I assume most people are familiar with “the medium is the message” but might not know who this is attributed to. That would be McLuhan, and in my limited reading it seems most modern media philosophy is downstream of him.
The core argument (if you could call it that) is this: the medium a concept is delivered through fundamentally shifts both the human mind and the culture the human exists within. I would compare this book, loosely, to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The similarity I find is that the authors have no interest in arguing a position to you, they simply lay out the history and present their vision of the past to you.
McLuhan begins by looking at the "oral" and "tribal" communities that humans once inhabited before writing. During this period, knowledge was fundamentally a communal concept. Any discussion of knowledge, folklore, or religion would have been a visual and shared group experience. He interestingly brings up examples of cultures that still exist within this paradigm, noting how they interact with film. He explores that people in these cultures are not sure what to make of or focus on in film, the medium is significantly different from how they view life. They are not accustomed to how to digest it and do not have a literacy of the medium which is required. This was a life unabstracted and the concept of sitting alone and reading a book to gain knowledge was completely foreign. Knowledge was represented in how well you existed within your environment.
He moves to manuscript cultures. To McLuhan, this was one of the first points of a split of the senses (audio-tactile complex). Before writing, speech existed with tone, rhythm, shared space and people. The alphabet strips that away and introduces a repeatable and linear system. A subtler point he makes: the ability to read between the lines, detect irony or subtext, is not a natural human skill. In the oral cultures, what was presented simply was. Subtext is a literacy phenomenon that began appearing in this age. This is where McLuhan begins to feel quite contemporary, he notes with electric media we are beginning to move towards an oral society again. I believe this is where many of the issues of “media literacy” are developed. We are currently caught between two paradigms / cultures and one consequence is a loss of the prints ability to understand subtextual content. On TikTok, there is no room to read between the lines, the algo simply pushes you forward.
Next he moves to post Gutenberg, the printing press introduced the identical, repeatable, mass-produced text. This lead to an even more individualized private culture. Where manuscripts were meant to be shared and memorized, print was meant to be enjoyed alone. Reading using your internal voice was also seen as a talent prior. From here he traces this to Nationalism, which I found interesting but maybe a bit overextended. I find that nationalism is an emotion that exists within humans (tribalism, religious loyalty, regional pride, etc) that exists as far as current communication allows us. So the observation of nationalism from print seemed to me a natural consequence, not something deeper. But, nationalism / isms do need something to be shared, and with print sharing the same linear, sequential, repeating text among people leads to a shared culture on a wider scale. McLuhan correctly observes that the global village will lead to the dismantling of this over time, which we are already beginning to see. Another interesting point he mentions, with print came the idea of perspective. In an age of increasing empathy, I wonder how much of that is downstream of print asking us to inhabit the minds of others. I imagine empathy outside of your tribe was much harder prior to print forcing you to view from another’s perspective.
The thought I returned to most while reading was this: print was the commoditization of knowledge. Same text, repeatable, available to everyone (even pushing out gates like Latin). I believe the final abstraction of humanity to be the commoditization of intelligence. I am not saying AI is that, but on the current trajectory it certainly feels like that. AI currently still exists within a “print” paradigm, but with the arms-race of world and vision models, you wonder how long that will last. We may not even know what comes next.
This book is all over the place and often times McLuhan has no interest in making his case, but the argument underneath (if you are with me in a print culture) is hugely interesting. I would recommend this book. I will say, I am not a hugely read person and McLuhan finds no issue with referencing obscure texts, but I think high use of quotations did not require a large reading list. Is he right though? I would say the general idea yes, but when you look at the more specific claims he makes they come across as pseudoscience. He makes oddly specific claims: The unconscious was created after print, schizophrenia too. I can't imagine that is correct. He says to the medieval man there was no such thing as figurative meaning in a text. I do not believe that, and have seen countless examples of the opposite. Overall, I find this book to give you some genuinely interesting ideas that are certainly applicable to life. The 100% argued truth is less important than beginning to think about the way the message changes your thinking and culture.